With help from Blue Yonder, HERBL Solutions is forging a path to increased supply chain efficiency

Earlier this week, Scottsdale, Ariz.-based Blue Yonder (formerly JDA), a provider of AI-driven and end-to-end supply chain management services said that Santa Barbara, Calif.-based HERBL Solutions, California’s largest cannabis distributor and supply chain services provider, is at work on developing an “end-to-end supply chain fulfillment backbone, with Blue Yonder’s Luminate Platform acting as its base foundation.

The Blue Yonder Luminate Platform is a TMS (transportation management system), which provides accurate inventory visibility, associated data transparency, and greater forecasting performance, in order for the “right products to get to the right places at the right times,” while improving HERBL’s end customer retail experience and increased growth potential for HERBL’s retail and brand partners, according to Blue Yonder.

In an interview, ElMarie Hugo, Sr. Director Industry Strategy at Blue Yonder, said that what drove the need for the collaboration between Blue Yonder and HERBL was that HERBL needed to establish a robust and agile supply chain that would meet regulatory requirements and enable reliable order fulfillment and inventory control “at scale” given the rapid growth market environment. 

“As a start-up, they had a blank slate to select the best-of-the-best software solutions—and one that would deliver results—as well as to design a supply chain network without any impediments,” she said. “The company’s leadership team, comprised of seasoned supply chain experts, had deep Blue Yonder product experience with the suite of selected products (from Demand Planning, Segmentation, Category Management to WMS). Based on their in-depth experience with the Blue Yonder products, HERBL’s leadership was confident that the Blue Yonder applications would deliver the value and would be foundational to building a robust and agile supply chain for entry into a highly competitive and hyper growth industry while also helping the company delivering on its promise to market.”

As for the biggest takeaways regarding how using Blue Yonder’s Luminate Platform will be beneficial for HERBL Solutions, Hugo pointed to various factors, including:

• Blue Yonder’s Luminate Platform-based solution deployment enabled rapid time to value by speeding implementation and creating ease of integration;
• operating in a Microsoft Azure-centric SaaS environment simplified the process of connecting key applications rapidly and reliably;
• the platform lends itself to the integration and aggregation of data from any source application through modernized API frameworks;
• the embedded AI/ML functionality in the platform provides for predictive management of demand /supply deviations by signaling in near real-time the shipment status, location demand, supply, and the impact of supply chain disruption;
• HERBL has end-to-end visibility of shipment status and control of inventory anywhere in the supply chain through the Luminate Control Tower – part of the Luminate Platform; and
• the nature of the platform allows for expansion of the customer’s ecosystem to include signals from the extended ecosystem and enables regulatory compliance and the management of quality

The next phase of HERBL’s strategy takes order management to a new level of sophistication by pairing up Luminate with enVista’s Order Management System, according to Hugo.

And she added that by leveraging enVista with Blue Yonder, HERBL will be able to accurately handle order management, with predictive and prescriptive warehouse management recommendations and highly accurate forecasts.

Mike Beaudry, chief executive officer, HERBL, expressed his optimism about this partnership.

“Our mission at HERBL is to bring outstanding people, processes, and technology together to create a powerful supply chain never before seen in the cannabis space,” said Beaudry in a statement. “It’s with this focus on quality that we selected Blue Yonder’s software solution, which will enable efficiencies and growth for our retail and brand partners, and to ultimately help propel our industry forward.”